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College Basketball By The Tweets: Bill Walton, Northern Illinois and the Rise Of Marshall Henderson

Posted by Nick Fasulo on January 30th, 2013

Nick Fasulo is an RTC correspondent who writes the column College Basketball By the Tweets, a look at the world of college hoops through the prism of everyone’s favorite social media platform. You can find him on Twitter @nickfasuloSBN.

Bill Walton Comedy Hour

There’s almost nothing better then the glee and unbridled joy Bill Walton spews into his microphone when calling a basketball game. Formerly an NBA-only announcer for ESPN, Walton has resurfaced this season calling Pac-12 games for the Worldwide Leader, and we’re all better for it. He’s a bit kooky, sure, but what’s most enjoyable about Walton is his unique ability to criticize and praise a player or coach with a positive tone of voice. Take Ben Howland, for example. While he’ll say it with a smile on his face, Walton is quick to judge the coach of his alma mater, and it was never more prevalent than last Thursday during the Bruins’ game against Arizona.

If you drank for every Bill Walton jab at Howland, you’d have passed out 10 minutes ago.

Duke Gets Wrecked By Hurricanes

It feels like it happened eons ago, but we can’t forget that the Blue Devils were embarrassed by Miami last week, potentially turning Coach K’s team in to national championship pretenders and Jim Larranaga’s team into real ACC contenders.

Duke paying a nice homage to then NCAA here, failing to do its job correctly in Miami.

Since Ryan Kelly went down with a busted foot, the Blue Devils are 2-2, and while that shouldn’t change the magnitude of the victory for The U, the annual rules of court rushing were brought to the Twitter table from the moment the game was all but over.

IF ANY OF YOU MIAMI STUDENTS STORMI HOPE YOU KNOW YOU WILL HAVE TO ANSWER TO BLOGGERS ON TWITTER

We all have our opinions on when this student celebration should and should not be warranted, but much like your fantasy football team, nobody else really cares to hear about it.

The Week of Marshall Henderson

It’s safe to say that no college basketball player currently has an unofficial popularity ranking higher than the Ole Miss junior guard. A virtual unknown entering the season, Henderson has thrust himself into the national spotlight with his sharpshooting and equally sharp attitude. Consider this: In the span of seven days, Henderson hung 32 points on Tennessee, then told the media the Rebels would beat the Vols 10 times out of 10.

Dear refs at Tennessee-Ole Miss: Please get out of the way and let me watch Marshall Henderson do his thing in peace.

Henderson may have disappointed in his first nationally-televised game where the build-up was all about him, but his impact was felt and the stage has been set for this kid to continue as a main character into March. Yep, Marshall Henderson is pretty much exactly what this college basketball season needed: a social media needle-mover.

Where Have All The Great Teams Gone?

It’s no secret that college basketball is down this year. There are no great teams, scoring is down, NC State can’t win on the road, blah blah blah. Some people appear to still be blinded from the truth, which is really sort of cute to see. I guess ignorance is bliss.

This is shaping up to be a terrific college basketball season. So many teams capable of winning against good teams. Makes every night fun.

Case in point: Northern Illinois is really bad. Like four points in the first half bad (a record); or 25 points in the entire game bad (not a record, but pretty embarrassing). Buried in the dregs of the Internet, the livestream to this game became quite prominent, as many watched with jaws agape with what was transpiring. There were hundreds, probably thousands of tweets worth recording, but all low-hanging fruit jokes were put to shame with this one tweet that incorporated Microsoft Paint.